Sartre's second century

Sartre and Nietzsche: Brothers in Arms 61
continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still
any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? 14
The immediate result is thus a loss of meaning for the human being. It
hence becomes necessary to tackle the question of meaning in hopes of
ultimately establishing new meanings as a replacement.
Sartre agrees with all this. He also considers the death of God as a
genuine liberation for human beings, as expressed in such plays as The
Flies (Les Mouches, 1943) and The Devil and the Good Lord (Le Diable et
le bon Dieu, 1951). As he explains though, this liberation is also a
condemnation as we are entirely responsible for what we make of
ourselves. We are condemned to be free, i.e. to be responsible for
ourselves and for our lives. Sartre has said that the death of God is the
equivalent to the death of all transcendence but with it comes "the opening
of the infinite", 15 that is, the infinite of human possibilities. As he puts it in
his Notebooks for an Ethics, "In this way, man finds himself the heir of the
mission of the dead God: to draw Being from its perpetual collapse into
the absolute indistinctness of night. An infinite mission." 16 Thus, nihilism
brings us to the loss of meaning, a meaning that the human being will have
to create in the wake of God's death and the absence of any transcendent.
Two Optimists
Immediately following nihilism, the human must deal with the
question of the meaning of existence. One must find an answer to the
question of whether life has any meaning and, if the answer is positive,
one must also determine what exactly that meaning is. The rejection of the
traditional worldview means a loss of a meaning-provider and consequently
of meaning itself. One must replace God by providing life with a
new meaning. And it is only through this that one can hope to erect a new
ethics entirely. Interestingly, Nietzsche and Sartre are both optimists in
relation to this quest for meaning. They believe that there is a meaning to
human existence and that we can uncover what that meaning is, since the
human being is the sole meaning-provider.
Their dealings with the problem are in each case very similar. Both
begin by stating that the world does not have intrinsic meaning. 17
14 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125,181.
15 Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, 34.
16 Ibid., 494.
17 Their theoretical bases for claiming this are different. I have given the details of
this in my previous works (see note 1).